Curt Smith: The month that exposed the left

Friday

Oct 23, 2009 at 12:01 AMOct 23, 2009 at 11:18 PM

Recently, Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for ... Well, inquiring minds still want to know. To paraphrase the Hudson Institute’s late Herman Kahn, the award ended a month of liberalism baring its genius for “confusing night and day.”

Curt Smith

Recently, Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for ... Well, inquiring minds still want to know. To paraphrase the Hudson Institute’s late Herman Kahn, the award ended a month of liberalism baring its genius for “confusing night and day.”

To Kahn, the average person could tell black from white, but had trouble “in the gray area.”

Today’s left-wing elite has trouble with right vs. wrong. Consider its tolerance -- even embrace -- of Van Jones, ACORN, David Letterman, Roman Polanski and the Nobel committee. Seldom have so many been so morally adrift.

Obama was nominated 12 days after becoming president. His award was ideological, not racial, like Nobelers Al Gore and Jimmy Carter. Franklin Roosevelt beat Hitler. John F. Kennedy braved a missile crisis. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. Snubbed by Nobel, each forged diplomatic summitry. Obama boasts a “beer summit” between a professor and cop.

A writer pledges a Nobel if I nominate him for a Pulitzer: each unqualified, a prerequisite for the prize. Some felt the president might decline the honor. The Bills might win a Super Bowl. “If you doubt our character,” Obama tells the U.N., “look at these last nine months” — at him, not Pearl Harbor or post-9/11. His elite lapped it up, cynical and corrupt.

In September, Van Jones, outed as a Communist, resigned as White House “Green Czar.” Film then caught the radical group ACORN teaching a faux prostitute and pimp to break the law. On Oct. 1, liberalism’s Dirty Old Man broke a story — his — David Letterman conceding “sex with women who work on this show.” The studio audience cheered Dave betraying his fiancé. The media obsessed on a producer-turned-extorter: Victim Dave! A Generation X talisman, it all came back to him.

That week another cause celebre made Letterman seem like Mr. Clean. In 1977, director Roman Polanski, 43, pled guilty of unlawful sex with a minor — a 13-year-old girl — for having got her drunk and drugged, ignored a cry to “keep away,” and having sex with her. (Most call this rape.) Fleeing America, Polanski went to Europe, made movies, and won an Oscar for “The Pianist”: apparently film’s Nobel.

Recently, the Swiss arrested Polanski for fleeing the United States, whereupon a California district attorney’s office sought extradition, after which he would get what was coming to him. What Hollywood wanted was for Polanski to get off free. “He has suffered enough,” said a petition signed by more than 100. Producer Harvey Weinstein called the rape “a so-called crime,” adding, “Hollywood has the best moral compass.” Hers broken, Whoopi Goldberg excused not “rape-rape.” What would FDR say about a predator preying on a teenage girl?

We know what leading 2009 Democrats said. Afraid of losing Hollywood’s ATM, they said virtually nothing about violating a girl young enough to be their daughter. Where was their decency? Exactly how do the ACLU, The New York Times, MSNBC and moveon.org inhabit the same orb as the lunch-bucket Forgotten Man of the New Deal and New Frontier?

Reagan noted how Communism’s “only morality … is what will further their cause.” How different is a Left elite trashing religion’s morality of right v. wrong? This month, Times reporter Gardiner Harris wrote of many “viewing outspoken commitment to a religion as a sign of mild dementia.” In truth, old-style liberalism would ascribe dementia to them.